Might be Time to Rescind the Four-Teams-Per-Owner Rule
bobbylabonte.com
You can’t help but feel sorry for guys like Reed Sorenson, Jamie McMurray, former Cup champ Bobby Labonte and David Stremme, among others.
With nine races to go, unless some type of miracle occurs, they’ll all likely be without rides at the end of this season.
That’s hard enough to swallow, but compounding the issue is that with team mergers and constriction of overall racing organizations, the odds of guys like Sorenson, McMurray, etc., finding new rides for next season is increasingly becoming gloomier.
Look at how things have played out over the last year. Petty Enterprises merged with Gillett Motorsports, and now will merge further with Yates Racing for 2010.
Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates merged with Dale Earnhardt Inc., at the end of last season. And Richard Childress Racing, which finally realized its long-held goal of expanding to four teams in 2009, may likely have to retrench and cut back to three teams in 2010, given Monday’s news that primary sponsor Jack Daniels will not return in any capacity for next season.
If sufficient replacement sponsorship can’t be found, there’s a good likelihood that Casey Mears may join Labonte, Sorenson and the others on the unemployment line.
All of this reduction in force among drivers could ultimately result in a very good likelihood of race fields of fewer than 43 cars for numerous events next year.
While I’ve long advocated smaller race fields, at the same time you don’t want to see classy guys like Labonte, Mears, Sorenson, McMurray, Stremme and others be left on the outside looking in.
When NASCAR chairman Brian France first instituted plans to limit individual team owners to a maximum of four teams per organization, it made sense. France wanted to open the sport up for more one- and two-car operation team owners to join the fun.
Unfortunately, we haven’t seen that. And now, we’re faced with the likelihood that as more teams merge and constrict, the same four-car maximum policy that was supposed to help the sport may actually wind up doing more damage.
I mean, if Jack Roush has the sales staff to sell sponsorships and support five, six or seven race teams, let him do it. If Richard Petty and Doug Yates want to run six cars and can afford it, I don’t see what the problem is.
Why? Think about it. If a driver loses his job, it’s one thing. But if teams continue to constrict in size, or are forced to dissolve a team to meet the NASCAR four-team mandate (like Roush is essentially being forced to do with McMurray’s team), all of a sudden one jobless driver becomes as many as a few hundred people out of a job, too, if the team is forced to fold to abide by NASCAR’s limitation on teams per owner.
While I understand what France wanted to accomplish and why, I think that he should reconsider things for the betterment of the sport – at least on a temporary basis.
Rather, I’d like to see France rescind the four-team-per-owner maximum through the 2012 season. That way, it gives existing teams and their owners the ability to add more drivers and hundreds more employees to the payroll if the organization has enough financial and sponsor wherewithal to support more than four cars under the same roof.
And isn’t keeping people working and being contributing members of society more important to the overall health of the sport than an artificially set mandate that may have already outlived its usefulness?
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